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| Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the attack on his party’s digital platforms had made him nervous about the rest of the campaign |
Jeremy Corbyn has warned that a cyber attack on Labourโs digital platforms could be a โsign of things to comeโ in the general election.
The Labour leader said the timing of the attack โ which slowed some of the partyโs campaign activities โ was โsuspiciousโ and had made him โnervousโ about what might happen in the rest of the campaign.
The so-called โdistributed denial-of-serviceโ (DDoS) attack, which took place on Monday, was described by the party as โsophisticated and large-scaleโ.
However, a source at the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which is investigating the incident, said it was relatively โlow levelโ with no evidence of โstate-sponsored activityโ.
In a DDoS attack, hackers flood a targetโs online platforms with traffic from various sources, with the aim of slowing down access or causing websites to crash.
Labour said the attack had failed due to the โrobust security systemsโ it had put in place and that it was confident there had not been any data breach.
While its security procedures had led to a temporary slowdown in it its campaigning activities, they were later back up to โfull speedโ.
However, speaking at a Labour campaign event in Blackpool, Mr Corbyn expressed concern about the implications for the rest of the election campaign.
โWe have a system in place in our office to protect us against these cyber attacks, but it was a very serious attack against us,โ he said.
โSo far as weโre aware, none of our information was downloaded and the attack was actually repulsed because we have an effective in-house developed system by people within our party.
โBut if this is a sign of things to come in this election, I feel very nervous about it all because a cyber attack against a political party in an election is suspicious, something one is very worried about.โ
Press Association
